A session about readings by Fathima Cader from two of her current works in progress: ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ and ๐พ๐ผ๐ฟ๐ผ๐ (๐๐๐๐๐).
๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ is her debut novel. It is set in the 1970s, as Ceylon transitions into Sri Lanka. From the islandโs bustling capital to a seemingly sleepy coastal town on the other side of the country, a young doctor, her increasingly rudderless husband, a recently jilted shopkeep, and his disappeared militant younger brother, find themselves invisibly but indelibly linked against a backdrop of brewing civil war.
๐พ๐ผ๐ฟ๐ผ๐ (๐๐๐๐๐) is Fathimaโs poetry collection. The Tamil title เฎเฎเฎฒเฏ, meaning ocean, foregrounds how the Tamil language was a key frontier of the war in Sri Lanka. The poems interweave Tamil script, transliterations, and translations throughout the otherwise English text, as well as some Arabic. They offer a visual, phonetic, and political disruption of the hegemony of monolingualism.
These manuscripts draw from over a decade of field and archival research. In these projects, Fathima brings both a poetic sensibility and historical rigour to the questions of how states conjure up borders, how art can further mass destruction, and how we might break free of the forever wars.
1 March 2026 (Sunday) | 2:00pm - 4:00pm